Pinterest Buys Image-Recognition Startup VisualGraph

Pinterest wants to step up competition with Facebook, Google and Yahoo in the white-hot field of image recognition.

European Pressphoto Agency

The social site for pinning collections of photos has purchased VisualGraph, a two-person startup that specializes in visual search, a Pinterest spokeswoman said in an email. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is a sign of growing demand for engineers with expertise in computer vision, a technology that helps computers learn to recognize people and objects inside photos and video. In 2012, Facebook bought Face.com to quickly identify the names of people in photos uploaded by users.

Last year, Yahoo snapped up LookFlow, a team of five engineers who it put to work on the image-sharing site Flickr.

VisualGraph is comprised of Stanford computer science graduate David Liu and Kevin Jing, a Google veteran who helped develop one of the Internet giant’s first image search applications in 2004. Jing will lead a new visual discovery team at Pinterest to “build technology to better understand what people are pinning,” the spokeswoman said.

Pinterest still lacks a system for tagging the photos posted to its site. With image recognition, the site could automatically detect items such as a red dress or a green convertible, making it easier for users to find them in the future.

Knowing the contents of so many photos could also help Pinterest tailor ads to users based on what they pin. Last October, the company raised $225 million from investors in a round of funding that valued it at $3.8 billion and put pressure on it to start generating revenue.

Other startups doing image recognition include Dropcam, which uses the technology to scan for people inside live surveillance camera video; and GumGum, which matches advertising to photos published around the Web.